Fear of Letting Go

Rick Henderson from the July 1996 issue

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Then there are the authoritarians, "true conservatives who have no natural inclination to bother about the size of government." For Pat Buchanan, Ralph Reed, and Bill Bennett, "Washington is irredeemably liberal, and preempts the assertion of moral authority at a lower level." Authoritarians can actually bond with libertarians in such areas as restoring welfare, education, and crime control as state and local responsibilities. But the groups have different reasons for disempowering Washington. "For most Republicans, devolution means less government. To authoritarians, however, it really does mean handing power to the states."

Even though Weisberg cleverly skewers the political class, his purpose, as the title says, is to defend government. And that's where Weisberg runs into trouble. He confesses the failure of government programs to solve social ills, from welfare policy to the drug war. It may be impossible to craft neat and tidy solutions for these problems, he admits. But it's the obligation of a liberal society to try. "The libertarian throws up his hands at the interplay of social evils and imperfect solutions, and says it's no concern of the state's," he writes. "But the liberal answers that government not only has the potential to better society, it has a moral obligation to do so."

As E.J. Dionne did in They Only Look Dead, Weisberg looks to the early-20th- century Progressives for inspiration. (See "Middle Management," May.) Yet unlike Dionne, who seems to celebrate the statist inclinations of Progressive central planners, Weisberg considers them reluctant power mongers. "Progressives did not advocate unbridled growth in government," he says. Instead, Progressives had to embrace central power because their times demanded "a government that could cage the new beast [of concentrated corporate power] and protect citizens from its ravages." And even though governmental institutions have failed, the "confident nationalism and assertive moralism that characterized the [Progressive] movement at its apogee [contains] attitudes we need to recapture.

"Liberals lost the support of the nation not because of their ideals," argues Weisberg, "but as a result of the flawed way they put them into practice." To regain the public's trust, he says, today's Progressives have to advocate a pragmatic, limited government, guided by what he refers to as "five habits of highly effective liberals": Accept risk, and steer away from policy prescriptions that treat adults as children, or as helpless victims of their environment. Stop overpromising and offer programs that try to alleviate social ills rather than "solving" them. Sunset federal programs frequently, because a "set expiration date fosters a mission mentality [on an agency] rather than a bureaucratic one." Stop pushing massive new laws that leave most of the regulatory decision-making in the hands of executive branch bureaucrats. And place a limit--as a percentage of national income--on the ability of federal, state, and local governments to tax and spend.

If you're wondering why Weisberg, who's no fan of libertarians, would advocate an agenda more radical than Dick Armey's, remember the author's goal: legitimating government activism. In his view, Progressives must relimit government to its most basic functions of defending the lives and property of all Americans. After accomplishing that, activists can once again ratchet state power upward a little bit at a time.

You don't have to be a Hayekian to recognize a problem with this approach. If a half- dozen cabinet agencies and their functions disappeared, if Social Security went private, if the responsibility for welfare programs shifted from government bureaucracies to charitable institutions, it's not clear that the typical voter would want a new spate of federal bureaus to spring up in their place. If your intention is burning the village to save it, sensible people might ask two questions: 1) Why not leave the village alone? 2) If we must burn down the village, why build a new, identical one on the same site?

In Defense of Government is astonishingly analogous to Dead Right, David Frum's important 1994 book on American conservatism. Frum took conservatives to task for embracing statism, arguing that during the 1980s conservative Republicans made a conscious decision to ignore the rapidly expanding federal government. The GOP recognized that average people like getting goodies from Uncle Sam, so any elected official who promised to end the gravy train would be unceremoniously removed from office come election day. But, argued Frum, the welfare state and the entitlement mentality were destroying such bourgeois virtues as thrift, prudence, and risk taking; unless conservatives were willing to renounce statism, the fabric of American society could be ripped beyond repair. To restore civil society, Frum believed, conservatives might have to embrace a form of limited-government libertarianism, because only by smashing the New Deal-Great Society bureaucracies could a new, conservative order emerge.

Weisberg offers a mirror image of Frum's thesis, asserting that effective but limited government will cause people to eventually yearn for new spending, higher taxes, and more intrusive regulations. Frum argued that libertarian means could achieve conservative ends; Weisberg says that embracing libertarian methods will result in support for new Progressive programs.

What's going on? Weisberg almost lets the cat out of the bag: "While they can talk in general terms about less intrusion and about scaling back specific programs, libertarians cannot present their full vision of the good society. They are to be pitied, perhaps, for never being able to explain what they believe." We libertarians in fact are often only too happy to share our beliefs, which quite simply, favor increasing human happiness by expanding individual liberty. We're also honest enough to recognize that a free society is more like a kaleidoscope than a photograph; it constantly changes in unpredictable ways. Weisberg demands that libertarians explain their world to such an extent that we could predict the per capita income of Newark 10 years after the arrival of "the good society." For us, even making such a request is silly.

Weisberg and Frum belong to the intellectual and policy environment that dominates the Boston-to-Washington corridor, an atmosphere that seems incapable of tolerating, much less comprehending, the messy, dynamic world in which we live. This intellectual universe routinely excludes those aspects of social activity that are not tied to the political process, such as entrepreneurship, commerce, music, literature, relationships, sports, spirituality--in other words, the most important parts of most of our lives. It's little wonder many people who are outside that universe think that those within speak a foreign language.

Until the best and brightest of the political class (and Weisberg is an excellent writer and thinker) break out of their conceptual box, they will continue to talk past the rest of us. What a shame.